Thoughts in a Haystack

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1) Miguel Servet y Reves, better known as Michael Servetus, was born in Northern Spain to noble parents sometime between 1509 and 1511.

2) Little is known about his childhood but his first notable act as an adult was to publish a book taking the side of Arianism, just in time for both the Reformation and the Counterreformation to decide that Arians were heretics. Needless to say, Servetus became a travelin' man.

3) In stops in Lyon and Paris Servetus learned medicine, eventually studying anatomy under the great Vesalius. Servetus, in service of his religious mysticism, developed an account of the pulmonary blood flow that sounds strange in our ears but was far closer to the truth than the ideas of his contemporaries. He starts by asserting that the spirit of God rested in three vital elements of the body: the blood, situated in the liver and veins, the heart and arteries and the spiritus animalis, a ray of light seated in the brain and nerves. The spirit is formed from the highest elements of the blood as it mixes with inhaled air. But then he gives the part we now remember. The union of the blood and air takes place in the lungs. The blood is conveyed through the right chamber of the heart to the lungs, where it is purged of "soot" through exhalation and mingled with inhaled air. Then it is returned back to the left chamber of the heart. He denied, as all had believed before, that the blood somehow passes directly through the wall between the right and left heart chambers.

4) Servetus at first courted the reformer Calvin but, when his religious views were spurned, Servetus not only published a book of his beliefs but ended it with a venomous attack on Calvin. Worst of all, Servetus neglected to remove himself from the jurisdictional reach of Calvin before doing this.

5) In an attempt to rectify his earlier error of judgment, Servetus managed to escape from prison but relocated himself only as far as Geneva, where he probably took up with an anti-Calvin party planning an attack on the religious leader. The plot was foiled, with Servetus recaptured and brought before the Inquisition.

6) In Servetus, Calvin had a perfect "teaching tool." Roundly hated by both the Protestant and Catholic authorities, his death would not inflame undue tensions between the sides but would be an object lesson to everyone that orthodoxy of one sort or the other was the best policy.

7) On October 17, 1553, Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva. A few days before, the Catholic Inquisition had burned Servetus' portrait in the absence of his corporeal form. It takes a rare talent to be burned by two opposing sets of religious zealots.

Oh, I said that I would try to pass on Wilkins' meme ... I didn't say I'd make it easy. It's selection, after all. Find the links if you can.